Can you tell the difference between music that passed through a pricey Monster stereo Cable, and a coat hanger? A reader forwarded us a post from the Audioholics Home Theater Forum and its author says no. He says his brother ran an experiment on him and four other audio aficionados listening to a new CD from a new group blindfolded. Seven different songs were played, each time heard with the speaker hooked up to Monster Cables, and the other time, hooked up to coat hanger wire. Nobody could determine which was the Monster Cable and which was the coat hanger. The kicker? None of the subjects even knew that coat hangers were going to be used.
A leaked Dell presentation accused Microsoft of making late changes to Windows Vista which forced key hardware partners to "limp out with issues" when the OS launched last year.
"Late OS code changes broke drivers and applications, forcing key commodities to miss launch or limp out with issues," said one slide in a Dell presentation dated March 25, 2007, about two months after Vista’s launch at retail and availability on new PCs.
The criticism was just one of many under the heading ‘What did not go well?’
Others ranged from knocks against Vista’s Windows Anytime Upgrade scheme, an in-place upgrade option, to several slams on ‘Windows Vista Capable’, the marketing programme that targeted PC buyers shopping for machines in the months leading up to Vista’s debut.
Funny how all the problems with Vista can be boiled down to two things: Microsoft’s tyrannical software license branding/activation scheme, and Vista’s locking down of the hardware to enforce film and music industry anti-piracy schemes.
In an email to CEO Steve Ballmer written less than three weeks after he took over the post, Sinofsky [chief of Windows development] spelled out his three reasons why Vista stumbled out the gate.
"No one really believed we would ever ship so they didn’t start the work until very late in 2006," Sinofsky said. "This led to the lack of availability [of device drivers]."
Okay…that’s bullshit. The reason why hardware vendors got started late, was because they kept having to start over. That’s right there in Sinofsky’s points two and three:
Next on his list: Changes to the operating systems’ video and audio infrastructure. "Massive changes in the underpinnings for video and audio really led to a poor experience at RTM," he said. "This change led to incompatibilities. For example, you don’t get Aero with an XP driver, but your card might not (ever) have a Vista driver."
Finally, said Sinofsky, other changes in Vista blocked Windows XP drivers altogether. "This is across the board for printers, scanners, WAN, accessories and so on. Many of the associated applets don’t run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models."
The hardware driver issues arise from Microsoft’s changes to the hardware API to prevent anyone from tapping a pure digital signal and thereby bypassing Vista’s DRM. Microsoft has gone as far as to demand that video and audio circuitry not provide any way for a signal to be tapped directly from the hardware, as a requirement for Vista certification.
The problems with Anytime Upgrade revolved around the fact that you had to have your original install disks so the software could verify that you had a non-pirated copy of Windows XP before it would install Vista. A lot of folks didn’t get those from the hardware vendors. Others had trouble with the validation process that resulted in their computers being rendered inoperable. Some were told that their license was invalid, even though they had legitimately purchased it, and then found they could not downgrade back to XP. For many it was a nightmare.
This is what happens when you put profit over reliability. Software license branding, digital rights management, all add complexity to operating system software, which needs to be as straightforward and elegantly designed as possible for the sake of reliability. But the only thing Microsoft and Hollywood give a good goddamn about in terms of reliability is the sound of the cash register. Microsoft became a multi-billion dollar company distributing software that could be easily copied, and for them to get pissed off enough about piracy that they’re willing to break your computer to make sure it doesn’t have an unlicensed copy of Windows running on it is on its face more a measure of their corporate greed then how bad the problem of software piracy may have been. Windows piracy couldn’t have been so bad if honest software purchasers made Bill Gates a billionaire fifty-six times over could it? Unless of course, even that wasn’t enough money for him.
This is why I’m running Linux at home, and a smattering of Apple Macs. Yes, iTunes has DRM embedded in it too, but Apple seems not as paranoid about it as Redmond. And Linux is open source, so I don’t have to worry that if I have a hardware failure my OS won’t work anymore when I swap out whatever broke with something new. Amazon.Com is selling DRM free music now that I can play on both iTunes and my Linux boxes just fine. I don’t need Microsoft anymore in my home anymore. And the fact is that Linux is a mature enough technology now that most folks, who just use their computers for email, text editing, maybe a little checkbook balancing and web surfing would have no trouble using it at all.
For the moment, it looks like most people are standing pat on XP, or even older versions of Windows. They don’t see the need to upgrade, especially when Microsoft keeps making the upgrade path more and more onerous. Vista is costly not only for the software itself but the hardware you have to buy to run it smoothly. It didn’t have to be this way. Microsoft could have had a hit on their hands if they’d produced Vista for their customers, and not their stockholders and Hollywood media moguls. Greed and paranoia about piracy are killing the music industry. It’ll do the same to the big software companies too if they want it to.
According to the emails made public last week, Microsoft will apply the lessons it learned with Vista the next time around. "There is really nothing we can do in the short term," noted Joan Kalkman, the general manager of OEM and embedded worldwide marketing, in a message written a week after Sinofsky’s. "In the long term we have worked hard to establish and have committed to an OEM Theme for Windows 7 planning.
Committed to an OEM Theme for Windows 7 planning. Committed to an OEM Theme for Windows 7 planning. Committed to an OEM Theme for Windows 7 planning. Take that apart and try to figure out what it means. Go ahead. I give Microsoft another decade before it completely implodes. Nobody cares about their goddamned slogans and buzzwords anymore. It all sounded so cool back when Microsoft was a bunch of bratty young computer geeks running rings around stogy old IBM, but it just doesn’t fucking cut it now.
It was never about the promise of the personal computer was it Bill? It was never about taking technology out of the hands of big corporations and their mammoth data processing centers and putting it on people’s desktops and giving them control over their own data and empowering them. It was all about money wasn’t it Bill? Software was never about empowering people, it was just a way for you to become rich. And now you’re even bigger then IBM, stodgier, and way more paranoid, and all the little computer geek children are writing Open Source software now that anyone can copy and modify and use however they want to and running Linux and BSD and they don’t give a shit about Microsoft. And they’re wearing t-shirts that say, In a world without fences, who needs Gates?
The Idaho Republican has just announced he’s taking applications for summer internships in his Capitol Hill office, which has been the brunt of gossip and many a colorful "wide stance" joke ever since last summer, when Craig was busted in a Minneapolis-St. Paul airport men’s room sex sting.
"Interns have the chance to be an essential part of a working congressional office," Craig said in a press release issued Tuesday. "They participate in the legislative process as well as ensure that constituent services run smoothly. For those interested in politics, it is an incredible opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at how our government functions while serving the people of Idaho."
Craig is giving preference to "Idaho applicants attending Idaho schools who are in their junior or senior years of college (including graduating seniors)."
The interns Craig seeks are "expected to fulfill some administrative duties such as answering phones, sorting mail and greeting constituents."
…with a pre-arranged shoe tap to let them know the coast is clear. Craig’s want ad is Here, where he also notes…
Idaho law students are encouraged to apply for a full-time position as Law Clerk working directly with my Chief Counsel in Washington, DC. Contact my Intern Coordinator to learn about requirements and how to apply.
I’ll bet his Chief Counsel is a very busy man these days. Unlike Mark Foley, I’ve yet to hear of Craig hitting on teenagers. His libido, if a tad whacked, seems nonetheless to be drawn toward other grown men. But still…what parent is going to consent to this? You want to intern for Who? Over my dead body…!
Heroes Of The War Against Homosexuality…(collect the entire series!)
Card #12: Houston District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal:
“I think that this Court having determined that there are certain kinds of conduct that it will accept and certain kinds of conduct it will not accept may draw the line at the bedroom door of the heterosexual married couple because of the interest that this Court has that this Nation has and certainly that the State of Texas has for the preservation of marriage, families and the procreation of children. “Even if you infer that various States acting through their legislative process have repealed sodomy laws, there is no protected right to engage in extrasexual – extramarital sexual relations, again, that can trace their roots to history or the traditions of this nation.” -Chuck, arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas
Rosenthal is back in the headlines again. Last December, as part of a federal civil rights lawsuit into how justice is meted out in the county, he turned over the (partial) contents of his government e-mail account. And what a batch of e-mails it was. Black ministers called for the Republican to resign because of racist material, including a cartoon depicting an African-American suffering from a "fatal overdose" of watermelon and fried chicken. There were adult video clips and love notes from Rosenthal to his secretary, his mistress during a previous marriage. "I love you so much," Rosenthal says in one. "I want to kiss you behind your right ear," he says in another. "Go spend time with your family," she admonishes him back.
Extrasexual extramarital sexual relations. Extrasexual extramarital sexual relations. Extrasexual extramarital sexual relations. What the fuck? There something in the water down there?
It has been blamed for directing huge articulated lorries down tiny country lanes, encouraging car drivers to plunge into impassable fords – and even sending inattentive motorists down railway lines.
And last night, it was revealed the curse of satnav has found yet another way to wreak havoc on Britain’s roads – by funnelling tall vehicles under low bridges.
The problem came to light after rail chiefs realized that three of the railway bridges most often hit by traffic lay in a one-mile radius in the same town: Grantham in Lincolnshire. Between them, they were struck an astonishing 62 times last year.
Half involved one of the structures, earning it the dubious distinction of being Britain’s most crashed-into railway bridge.
A spokesman said: "It’s a rising problem and satnavs are playing a greater role. They are great tools but they are no substitute for common sense and following the rules of the road."
An AA spokesman added: "The fact that you’re getting bridges with a reputation for being hit suggests that satnav software is directing large numbers of vehicles to take those particular routes.
"The problem is ‘blind reliance’. If people were using a map they would be more likely to question whether a bridge was high enough for their vehicle but it’s staggering to what extent people are blindly relying on technology."
Freight Transport Association director Geoff Dossetter agreed: "Satnavs are wonderful for drivers in unfamiliar territory but if a road sign says ‘low bridge ahead’ there really shouldn’t be any doubt about what that means.
"Foreign drivers are particularly bad in their blind adherence to satnav and need to improve their behaviour."
The first question that came to my mind was, isn’t there one of those universal road signs that means "Low Bridge"? And apparently, there are:
I own a car that has a satnav system in it, and I’m here to tell you it’s a lovely little bit of technology. And I’m someone who Never had trouble with maps. I love reading maps. A favorite pastime of mine since I got paid vacation is to browse my big road Atlas like it’s a Christmas toy catalog. But for helping me navigate large, snarly highway interchanges in unfamiliar territory, or guiding me to a specific address when I have to be someplace at a certain time, the satnav system is really handy. Even so, if I saw it telling me to drive into a creek or make the next left onto a set of railroad tracks, I wouldn’t do it. I’d probably just frown and think to myself, well this part of the map needs a little work.
But that’s because I understand the technology from the inside out. It’s not some kind of mysterious magic to me. To me it’s only a computer program manipulating pixels on an LCD screen. I may not know the details of how that particular program works, but I can build a general idea of how it’s probably doing it in my head. I know what it is that it’s telling me and, just as importantly, what it isn’t telling me. But more importantly, probably, I know what all computer professionals know about computers: garbage in equals garbage out. It didn’t take me long after I got the Mercedes, to realize that just because its nav system is telling me there’s a gas station two miles ahead of me, that doesn’t mean that there really is a gas station two miles ahead of me. It might be there was one there at one time, when the map was being made, but now it’s abandoned. Or it might never have been there at all to begin with. At some point, all the information in one of those satnav systems had to be put into it by a human. And if the human got it wrong, the computer will happily feed you the wrong information just as though it was good information. And not even ask for thanks, because it’s just doing its job.
I know this. I have to keep reminding myself that to other people, computers seem a tad mysterious and maybe even a bit creepy. You can’t see a program running. The computer just sits there and then the next thing you know it’s displaying something on the screen. Maybe it’s what you asked for. Maybe it’s something like this…
And a lot of people, seeing that, wouldn’t curse the lazy ass programmer who wrote that lousy, utterly worthless error message, but just sit there and let their computer make them feel stupid and they’re not. The computer knows something I don’t… No…the computer doesn’t know anything. It’s just a machine.
I know a lot of people feel this way about computers:
Everyone always wants new things. Everybody likes new inventions, new technology. People will never be replaced by machines. In the end, life and business are about human connections. And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake. And to me, the choice is easy. -Michael Scott, The Office
But this is as silly as saying that skin will never be replaced by clothes. We are not our technology, but our technology is us. Technology does not dehumanize us. That’s trope. A stone ax is technology. A plow is technology. A book is technology. To say that humans are tool makers misses it a tad. Tools are the visible part of the human soul. They are embodiments of our thoughts, our feelings, our innermost selves. They are art. All technology, is art. The masters of a craft, the ones who make the best, most useful, most enduring tools, are the ones who understand this. In the way that output is only the visible part, the part you can see, of the running computer program, the things humans make, our tools, our machines, our buildings, our works of art, are embodiments of the inner, essential human nature every generation leaves behind in its wake. Whether it’s an arrowhead, a cuckoo clock or a satnav system, their nature is our own. And as the saying goes "There’s nothing as queer as folk".
Computers are something humans came up with, to help with tasks that humans wanted to do. They’ve become ubiquitous because the basic technology is so damn versatile. Trust it where you can verify that it’s working properly and not when it hands you something you can plainly see with your own two eyes is crap. It’s just a machine. It’s judgment cannot replace yours because it doesn’t have any judgment. It’s just a machine. In his poem, The Secret of the Machines, Rudyard Kipling wrote…
Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes,
It will vanish and the stars will shine again,
Because, for all our power and weight and size,
We are nothing more than children of your brain!
When the road and the nav system disagree, believe the road. If the computer directs you to go jump in a lake, it’s not being malicious, and you don’t have to do it. It’s not working right. Go find the programmer and make them fix it.
Last week, in the Jamaican town of Mandeville, three gay men were attacked in their home by an angry mob of approximately 20 people who had threatened them with violence days before if they did not leave the community.
After the incident, two of the attacked men were hospitalized, one with serious injuries including a severed ear, an arm broken in two places and a damaged spine, while another man is still missing and feared dead. This is only the latest in a wave of attacks on gay men in notoriously homophobic Jamaica.
According to a Human Rights Watch press release, the attack on these men echoes another incident in the same town on Easter Sunday, April 8, 2007 when approximately 100 men gathered outside a church where 150 people were attending the funeral of a gay man.
According to mourners, the crowd broke the windows with bottles and shouted, “We want no battyman [gay] funeral here. Leave or else we’re going to kill you. We don’t want no battyman buried here in Mandeville.”
Several mourners inside the church called the police to request protection. After half an hour, three police officers arrived but did little to calm situation, opting instead to commiserate and laugh with the menacing mob until several gay men among the mourners took knives from their cars for self-defense.
This seems to be causing a bit of a drop off in tourism in that lovely country. The solution?
Jamaica plans to tap into the thriving market for religious-oriented tourism to invigorate the island’s sagging economy, government officials and business leaders said.
A new convention center, to be built by 2009, will attract some of the millions of travelers who attend religious conferences outside of their home countries, said Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett. The global religious tourism market is an $18 billion-a-year industry with some 300 million travelers, according to the Colorado-based World Religious Travel Association.
Hey mon…I have a plan…you know…let’s go after the hate market…
Of course, the flaw in this grand plan is that the hate market, at least here in America, doesn’t much like darkies either. But if you shine their shoes and call them "Massa" they’ll at least tip decently.
Adventures In Home Ownership…(Beware Edsal Medium Duty Steel Shelving!)
My twenties were a period of time where I wandered from one low paying job to another, while I was trying to make a living as a freelance photographer. I did a lot of warehouse work in those days, and various Manpower temp jobs. In the process I think I’ve put up more generic utility steel shelving in my life then Carter has pills (as my mom used to say). I’ve put up a fair amount of wood shelving too, including the Ikea particle board and veneer bookshelves scattered all over Casa del Garrett. Which is all to say that, dazed and confused though I am about a lot of things, I pretty much know how to put together shelving.
Casa del Garrett is full of shelving. There are bookcases everywhere, both free standing and bolted onto the walls. I’ve added the occasional shelf to the kitchen cabinets where I thought they were needed. There’s wall shelving in the basement, where I keep my winter supplies, and little glass shelves where I keep my favorite bottles of sugary cordials by the bar that I’ve modified slightly to suit myself. This afternoon, I attempted to put up some new steel shelving in the basement, in a corner that I’ve needed to organize for some time now. I say ‘attempted’, because I ended up buying what must be the worst piece of junk I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Which kinda impresses me in a way, because as a fifty-four year old American, I’ve seen a lot of junk.
The corner in my basement where the dryer and the sump pump live is an odd one. I’ve been fussing with it ever since I bought the house, never quite knowing what to do with it. Eventually it began to accumulate a bunch of other things I didn’t know quite what do with either, mostly tools. In one spot I kept all my tall yard tools…various rakes, shovels, and such, and the wide utility bristle broom. These were all kinda piled together in the corner and getting one particular one out of the pile was getting to be a chore. Next to that was a spot where I’d been stacking up power tools in their plastic carry cases. Some of them, like the grinder, didn’t have nice carry cases so I left them in the boxes they came in. On top of the grinder box I had two rubbermaid storage bins full of various things. One bin holds all my extension cords. Another some darkroom equipment that I seldom use anymore, mostly relating to the enlarger I don’t have anymore. Next to that, was the big box my leaf vacuum lives in between seasons. I had the miter saw stacked on top of it.
So that was an area of the basement that needed organizing. What kept me from doing it was that all the dimensions there were odd. Most ready made shelving comes in 36 or 48 inch widths and I had only one chunk of space of 30 inches and one of 22 to work with. Additionally, the circuit breaker box and electricity meter is near the middle the wall and the water pipes and shutoff valves to the bathroom on the other end toward the bathroom. I couldn’t build shelving over either of these, and I couldn’t put anything over the spot in the floor where the sump pump was. Every time I stopped to think of ways to organize that space, I’d get bogged down trying to resolve all the odd dimensions I had to work with, and I’d just put it off some more because there was always something else to do around the house. I could have easily built some custom wooden shelving, but I didn’t want wood next to the dryer, which is gas.
What finally got me motivated was sometime during that night last Thursday the bathroom toilet sprung a small leak where the water feed connects to the tank. A small trail of water then spread from the leak out the bathroom door and toward the sump pump. Which is good…that’s where leaking water is supposed to go in the basement. But along the way it seeped into the cardboard boxes where my leaf vacuum and grinder live, which made the bottoms soggy enough that they collapsed under the weight of the bins and the miter saw stacked on top. I came downstairs yesterday morning to get some things out of the dryer, only to see the miter saw and the Rubbermaid bins tumbled onto the floor, the leaf vacuum box on its side, the grinder’s box sagging to one side, and water seeping out from the bathroom door.
Good morning sleepyhead! So the first thing on the agenda was finding out where the leak was coming from, and then turning off the water to the bathroom. It’s…disturbing…how much water can result from just a small drip drip dripping leak over just a few hours. The previous owner had installed these really nice ball valves on the lines leading into the bathroom in the basement, so shutting off the water to the bathroom wasn’t a problem…I didn’t even bother with the toilet shut off valve. Those ball valves are nice…at some point I want to replace all the shutoff valves in the house with them. Once the water was off I moved everything out of the area and mopped it all down. I spent a few minute checking the miter saw and the grinder for damage. They looked okay.
I put a bucket under the toilet tank by the water feed and flushed once to empty the tank, then disconnected the water feed and removed the old fill valve and let the remaining water drain out. I checked the area around the inlet to make sure the tank hadn’t cracked on me, which thankfully it hadn’t. Then I took a quick trip to Home Depot for a new fill valve, and a flexible water line to replace the solid one the previous owner had installed between the toilet shutoff valve and the tank. The only flexible water lines in Casa del Garrett are the ones I’ve installed since moving in, and that’s basically the second floor toilet. Eventually I want to replace every final connection to every faucet with flex line too because it makes things easier to work on.
While I was at Home Depot I wandered around the shelving area. Now I really wanted to get that corner around the dryer and sump pump under control. Over the years I’d let it become a clutter that I had to wade through whenever I needed something. Just getting out the big broom usually meant taking several other long yard tools out of the stack first, just to get to it. While I was looking around Home Depot I saw just the thing: a really neat looking yard tool organizer made by Black and Decker, that looked like it would fit in that area nicely. It was only twenty bucks.
Then I spied some shelving that was just the right size: Thirty inches wide and not 36. So I brought a box of that home too. It’s this shelving I want to warn you about.
As I said at the beginning of this, I’ve built a lot of steel shelving in my life. This stuff, made by Edsal, is just plain junk. When I got the box back home and opened it I saw a collection of cheap steel stampings that, when you fitted them together, simply would not stay together.
Note that the propaganda on the box says the "Unit holds up to 1,000 pounds!" Sure sounds like they’re telling you this thing can hold a lot of weight. And here’s what’s supposed to hold all that weight:
That’s it. That’s what you get. A bunch of cheap steel stampings and four 1/8th inch pieces of particle board. There are little tabs on the uprights, and groves on the cross members you’re supposed to fit together and, as the instructions say, lightly tap into place until they lock.
Except they don’t lock together at all. The cross members kinda loosely hang over the tabs…
I tried for hours to get the pieces of that thing to stay together long enough that I could fully assemble one section (you’re supposed to bolt two sections of this thing together (!), one on top of the other, to get the advertised height) and they just wouldn’t. Look closely at that joint. There are two fatal flaws in the design that I can see. First, the groves on the cross beams don’t seat all the way down on the tabs. At least, not with the "tap" that the instruction manual says you give them. In fact, you can take a hammer to this joint pretty forcefully and the cross beam still won’t seat fully. But look more closely. Notice that the end of the cross beam doesn’t fit right up into the corner of that upright. There’s a small gap there, between the end of the beam and the corner of the upright. That allows the beam to move slightly along that axis, even after it’s seated as far as you can get it to seat in the tabs. If it sat snugly in the corner it might not be so bad, because it couldn’t move then. But I still wouldn’t want to load this thing with a thousand pounds of anything.
Some steel shelving uses x bracing you attach to the back of the shelves to add rigidity. As near as I can tell, Edsal expects the particle board shelves you lay over the beams to provide enough rigidity to the unit that the beams won’t wiggle out of their tabs. But they don’t. The entire unit can still flex and twist enough that sooner or later one of the beams wiggles free and then the entire thing collapses.
I never got it put together. After a while I started trying to out think the poor design of the thing, and that led me to determine that I’d have to drill holes in it so I could bolt the damn thing together, and then add some additional bracing in the back of it or else I could never trust it to hold anything. I was seriously considering doing that, but I eventually realized I was letting my pride get the better of me. I didn’t want to admit I’d just been taken for a sucker. I’m not normally that trusting of what I see on the box. But I never expected in my wildest dreams to open a box of basic utility room steel shelving that was this utterly pathetic.
For kicks and grins, I did a google search on Edsal steel shelving, and came across these customer reviews over at Amazon of the 36 inch wide model…
Awful
Complete junk – The other 3 reviews describe the issues perfectly. I had to use duct tape to hold the pieces together.
…
Junk!
This product has got to be one of the most poorly designed that I have ever tried to assemble. While boltless design may sound appealing, the slide-in tabs are not built to fit the piece that must be locked into it. Therefore, one is required to wedge, bang, or pry open the tabs so that they may be large enough, but once you get the pieces to fit together, the opening is far too large for it to stay secure. So then you try to bang it closed. Very sketchy. The whole piece wobbles, falls apart at random moments throughout the assembly process, and the cardboard shelves are flimsy, full of splinters, and cheap. The whole experience was frustrating, right down to trying to fit all the pieces back into the box so that I can return it.
…..
Worst EVER
These shelves won’t even support their own weight. I’d hate to see what might happens if a person actually tried to store something on them. I have fairly extensive experience with this type of inexpensive metal utility shelving and these are BY FAR the worst Ive ever tried. No matter how well you seat the boltless "fasteners", the unit sways and twists uncontrollably. A close reading of the instructions reveals that the shelves must be attached to the wall to work (this despite the clear picture of a free-standing unit on the box). Additionally, the 1/4 inch(!) particleboard shelves are weak like cardboard (but heavier), and do nothing to support the structure of the frame. The last straw is the complete lack of a crossbrace which might work to keep the thing square. What a total waste of time and energy. On the plus side, disassembly is a breeze since it falls apart on its own. :D
…
Four big NO votes on American Inventor..!
"Close, but no cigar" describes this attempt at a "boltless" shelving unit. It’s nice not to have to worry that there’ll be enough nuts, bolts and washers in some plastic baggie, but the reality of it is an extremely frustrating experience.
The tabs are poorly designed- both tabs on an end of the horizontal supports are exactly the same length. This means that BOTH tabs have to be started perfectly AT THE SAME TIME, to make them slide in. If one tab was slightly shorter, you could start one, then the other.
If the tabs are bent AT ALL, they won’t line up properly and either won’t slide into the slots, or will poke out to the outside instead of properly sliding all the way through the slot. Either way, it means taking the joint apart and bending the tabs until they slide in.
The problem with that is that there is NO positive locking of the tabs once they finally DO get through the slots. This means the end you struggled with for 10 minutes may pop out while you’re trying to deal with the other end. Trying to remove one end to re-align the tabs is likely to disloge BOTH ends, making you start completely over. The weight of the shelves and the items on the shelves will hold the tabs and slots together once you get that far, but during assembly it’s a recipe for extreme frustration.
There’s more wrong with the desigh, but you get the idea… I never wished so much for a plastic baggie full of nuts and bolts.
So I’m not the only one who is a tad displeased with the product. This crap should have never made it out of the drawing room. Somebody in management should have laughed in the face of the "engineer" who brought them this thing. You’re joking…right? Hahahaha…good one… Now get back to work…
I’m taking the shelves back to Home Depot in a little while. I’ll let you know what happens there. Basically, I’ll settle for a store credit. But I’m going to strongly urge them to get word back up the chain of command there, that this stuff is dangerous. Somebody manages to actually get this shelving together and actually tries to load it up with a thousand pounds and they’re going to get hurt.
[Update…] Home Depot cheerfully accepted my return, no hassle…
Me: Hi…I bought this here yesterday…
She: Yeah…I think I sold it to you.
Me: Right…yeah…you were working the register…
She: (cheerfully) So what’s the problem hon…?
You gotta love Baltimore folks. I explained the issues I had with the shelving and she took the merchandise back, scanned in my receipt and issued me a credit. So that’s that. Hopefully word percolates up the ranks that this stuff isn’t worth selling. Somebody gets hurt when one of these collapses under weight and you just know the lawsuits will go flying…
"Lest there be anyone left who believes the RIAA’s propaganda that its litigation campaign is intended to benefit the ‘creators’ of the music, Hollywood Reporter reports that the RIAA is asking the Copyright Royalty Board to lower songwriter royalties on song file downloads, from the present rate of 9 cents per song — about 13% of the wholesale price — down to 8% of wholesale. Meanwhile, the big digital music companies, such as Apple, want the royalty rate lowered even more, to something like 4% of wholesale. So any representations by any of these companies that they are concerned for the ‘creators’ of the music must henceforth be taken with a boxcar-load of salt."
Here’s a business model for you: First you squeeze your customers…then you squeeze your creators. It isn’t piracy that’s destroying the music business…it’s the music business.
Inverness Middle School science teacher Steve Crandall says he chooses to tell students that science doesn’t have all the answers.
No. But it has a few…
"I understand politicians like to compromise and that faced with one group who
say two plus two equals four and another group that says two plus two equals
six, will tend to arrive at a position that says two plus two equals five.
Unfortunately, sometimes the answer has to be four…" -Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education
The middle ground between the right answer and the wrong answer is a different wrong answer.
Fittingly, the first person to detect a faint signal in all the noise was the interpreter.
The 33-year-old woman who worked for eight years working with Spanish-speaking patients at a medical clinic in southern Minnesota noticed something familiar as she translated the story of a young meatpacker last September.
Earlier last summer, she had heard a version of it from two other workers at the same slaughterhouse, and had told it to their doctors, who were different from her current patient’s. When the consultation was over, she pointed this out.
The interpreter’s insight set in motion a story, still unfolding, that may be making envious the ghost of Berton Roueche, the legendary chronicler of medical mysteries at the New Yorker magazine. A new disease has surfaced in 12 people among the 1,300 employees at the factory run by Quality Pork Processors about 100 miles south of Minneapolis.
The ailment is characterized by sensations of burning, numbness and weakness in the arms and legs. For most, this is unpleasant but not disabling. For a few, however, the ailment has made walking difficult and work impossible. The symptoms have slowly lessened in severity, but in none of the sufferers has it disappeared completely.
While the illness is similar to some known conditions, it does not match any exactly. Nor is the leading theory of its cause something medical researchers have studied. That is because the illness appears to be caused by inhaling microscopic flecks of pig brain.
Now…why would workers at a meat processing plant be inhaling pig brains…you ask? And why hasn’t something like this turned up before among meat factory workers? Something must have changed.
And indeed it has…
The 12 sufferers of the neurological illness — most are Hispanic immigrants — all work at or near the "head table" where the animals’ severed heads are processed.
One of the steps in that part of the operation involves removing the pigs’ brains with compressed air forced into the skull through the hole where the spinal cord enters. The brains are then packed and sent to markets in Korea and China as food.
Investigators say there is no reason to suspect that either the brains or the pork cuts were contaminated. Their working hypothesis is that the harvesting technique — known as "blowing brains" on the floor — produces aerosols of brain matter. Once inhaled, the material prompts the immune system to produce antibodies that attack the pig brain compounds, but apparently also attack the body’s own nerve tissue because it is so similar.
Black lung disease. Flock worker’s lung. All the various aliments that arise from inhaling solvents. Christ…second hand smoke for God’s sake! It’s not as though businesses aren’t well aware by now that when the workplace generates a lot of crap in the air, workers get sick unless they’re wearing some kind of protection. But no. Here’s a brand new Cost Effective way of quickly getting the brains out of pigs so they can be sold at market, and no one apparently wondered what spewing atomized brain tissue from hundreds of pigs every day into the factory air might do to the workers.
This is why there need to be unions. And governmental oversight of the workplace. Because somebody needs to think about this. The boys in the front office sure as hell won’t. Safety measures cost money after all.
On the February 3 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday, panelist and New York Times columnist Bill Kristol said the only people supporting Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-NY) presidential campaign "are the Democratic establishment and white women." Kristol then asserted that "it would be crazy for the Democratic Party to follow an establishment that’s led it to defeat year after year," and added, "White women are a problem, that’s, you know — we all live with that." After fellow panelist Brit Hume responded, "Bill, for the record, I like white women," Kristol said, "I know, I shouldn’t have said that."
That would be Bruce Bower I’m referring too, not yours truly. Bower, who wrote in Stealing Jesus how Christian fundamentalists have turned Jesus’ message of love and forgiveness into a religion utterly devoid of love let alone forgiveness, is loosing his mind. And the first hint you get of that in his latest essay, First They Came For The Gays, is that he’s writing now for the 101st Fighting Keyboarders over at Pajamas Media.
Reading Sebastian Haffner’s disturbing memoir, Defying Hitler, I learned two facts that were surprising to me. First, that the German people were delivered into the tender mercies of the Nazis, not by a bunch of weak kneed decadent liberal appeasers, but with the systematic destruction of the Weimar constitution by a series of right wing governments, each of which had declared that harsh measures had to be taken to protect Germany from extremists. And secondly, that the Communist menace was, by the time the Reichstag was burning down, almost completely toothless. It’s leaders and followers had been decimated by a series of anti-labor pogroms in the previous decade.
As it turned out, the communist menace was a convenient scarecrow various right wing governments waved in people’s faces, so it could do away with those constitutional rights and guarantees it found inconvenient. Not that people weren’t seriously afraid of the Communists…they were. But the actual menace to Germany, the domestic one, the Nazis, had much more in common with the rightist governments then people cared to notice. The argument was always that stern measures were needed to quell domestic unrest. But by 1932 that unrest was almost exclusively the work of the Nazis, not the Communists. The grim irony I discovered in Haffner’s book, was that if there was any appeasement going on back then in Germany, it was at the hands of the right who kept trying to appease the fanatics on Their right with the piecemeal dismantling of the democracy the Nazis detested, in order to save Germany from fanatics like…well…the Nazis. But they didn’t save it from extremism, so much as grease the skids for it. Here’s a clue for you Bruce: You don’t defend democracy, by abolishing it piecemeal.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Bower, an American of my own generation who has since migrated to Norway, a gay conservative who just co-incidentally has a new book out titled, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, plays his part:
The reason for the rise in gay bashings in Europe is clear – and it’s the same reason for the rise in rape. As the number of Muslims in Europe grows, and as the proportion of those Muslims who were born and bred in Europe also grows, many Muslim men are more inclined to see Europe as a part of the umma (or Muslim world), to believe that they have the right and duty to enforce sharia law in the cities where they live, and to recognize that any aggression on their part will likely go unpunished. Such men need not be actively religious in order to feel that they have carte blanche to assault openly gay men and non-submissive women, whose freedom to live their lives as they wish is among the most conspicuous symbols of the West’s defiance of holy law.
Multiculturalists can’t face all this. So it is that even when there are brutal gay-bashings, few journalists write about them; of those who do, few mention that the perpetrators are Muslims; and those who do mention it take the line that these perpetrators are lashing out in desperate response to their own oppression.
The "Multiculturalists" Bower refers to here, and throughout, are strawmen. But more to the point, they are a standard right wing strawman. And that strawman is intended not so much to discredit multiculturalism, as democracy, and its bedrock of liberty and justice for all. In the name of sounding the alarm over the rise of anti-gay violence in Europe, Bower attaches that violence indiscriminately to a people, and to an entire religion. And in doing so he smears, backhandedly, cowardly, in the very manner of the anti-democratic subversive he claims to be standing proudly against, the central idea of democracy itself: that all citizens are equals under the law.
To claim that multiculturalism means tolerating honor rape equally with women’s freedom is pathetic bar stool sophistry, on the order of arguing that anti-lynching laws are just as much the product of bigotry as the lynchings themselves. This boilerplate right wing bar stool doggerel not only cheapens the political conversation, it means to actively shut it down. It’s Orwell’s black is white, up is down, doublespeak. And the idea here isn’t to discredit tolerance, but democracy. Where the promise of democracy belongs only to some, it belongs to no one. Except, perhaps, the ones who decide who is in, and who isn’t. The Europeans are painfully aware of exactly where that leads.
And that’s probably the brick wall that Bower, an American of my own generation, keeps hitting when he babbles on and on about how the Europeans need to wake up to the Islamist Menace, like he thinks he’s Paul Revere and not Father Coughlin. The events leading up to World War II in Europe are not so distant that the people over there have forgotten what happens when you start stigmatizing minorities, and Bower isn’t warning about a rise in intolerance and violence toward minorities: he’s warning them about the Muslims. He’s blaming it all on them. He’s telling Europe that it has a Muslim Problem. That’s probably scaring his audience the hell away. If he’d taken some time to try to understand the people he’s living among now, he might have expected that. But then if he could open his eyes a tad to the world around him, he might not be such a brick brained conservative now either. It’s really sad to watch a keen mind suffocate itself.
The problem facing gay people in Europe, as well as the rest of the world, isn’t radical Islamic fundamentalism, it’s radical fundamentalism period. And that rising, anti-modernist, anti-humanist, fundamentalism isn’t just threatening gay people, and it isn’t just threatening Europe. It’s a threat to democracy everywhere, to gay people, to women, to anyone who won’t bow down to its law. And it wears its Jesus mask as easily as it wears its Mohamed mask. In the end it isn’t about God or piety, it’s about obedience. In Stealing Jesus, Bower almost seemed to grasp that. Now he’s just letting his cheapshit xenophobia do his thinking for him. If I could stop being tired of seeing this kind of crap I might be sad for him.
He need only look to the scorched earth war between the gay haters and everyone else in his own church, the Anglicans, to see that isn’t true. There, the leader of the movement to chuck gay people out of the communion of Christ like so much human garbage, Bishop Peter Akinola, who once said he once literally jumped backward after realizing he’d shaken hands with a gay man, heartily endorse a proposed Nigerian law which would not only have outlawed same sex marriage, but prohibit any association of gays and lesbians, restrict their freedom of speech and movement, even to the point of making meeting in a restaurant or together in their own homes an illegal act. Here’s what Akinola, an ersatz Christian, had to say about the law…
"The Church commends the law-makers for their prompt reaction to outlaw same-sex relationships in Nigeria and calls for the bill to be passed since the idea expressed in the bill is the moral position of Nigerians regarding human sexuality."
And if that wasn’t enough…
"The Church affirms our commitment to the total rejection of the evil of homosexuality which is a perversion of human dignity and encourages the National Assembly to ratify the Bill prohibiting the legality of homosexuality since it is incongruent with the teachings of the Bible, Quran and the basic African traditional values."
So here’s Akinola embracing his Christian, Muslim and African brothers in the war on homosexuality. Multiculturalism anyone? And surely Bowers knows by now that the upcoming schism in his church is being funded in large measure by American right wingers, and in particular Howard Ahmanson, the former Christian Reconstructionist who now claims he no longer considers it essential to stone homosexuals to death, although "It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral…" You can just hear him handing Akinola and his brethren the stones there. Shara law anyone?
In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.
The trio leading the Watchmen are Alexey Ledyaev, leader of the New Generation Church, an evangelical Christian megachurch in Riga, Latvia, Ken Hutcherson, leader of the Antioch Bible meagchurch near Seattle Washington, and Scott Lively, a holocaust denier who wrote The Pink Triangle, in which he claims that Nazism itself is a form of homosexuality, and that the Nazis didn’t so much persecute homosexuals, as were themselves homosexual. This claim he is currently busy spreading far and wide throughout Eastern Europe, a land whose people suffered a cataclysm at the hands of the Nazis during the second world war. That propaganda has done its work on some younger Slavs…
On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless — two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.
According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them "7-Eleven workers" and "Sodomites." The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a "good church" like theirs. According to Singh’s friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh’s party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.
The pregnant woman said she didn’t want to fight them.
"We don’t want to fight you either," one of them replied in English. "We just want your faggot friend."
One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh’s friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.
Outside Singh’s hospital room, more than 100 people held a vigil. Many were Sacramento gay activists who didn’t know Singh personally, but who saw his death as the tragic but inevitable result of what they describe as the growing threat of large numbers of Slavic anti-gay extremists, most of them first- or second-generation immigrants from Russia, the Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union, in their city and others in the western United States.
In recent months, as energetic Russian-speaking "Russian Baptists" and Pentecostals in these states have organized to bring thousands to anti-gay protests, gay rights activists in Sacramento have picketed Slavic anti-gay churches, requested more police patrols in gay neighborhoods and distributed information cards warning gays and lesbians about the hostile Slavic evangelicals who they say have roughed up participants at gay pride events. Singh’s death was the realization of their worst fears.
"After a couple years of fundamentalist and Slavic Christian virulent anti-gay protests at almost every Sacramento gay event in the region," said local gay rights activist Michael Gorman, "what the gay community has feared for some time has finally happened."
Now Bower again…
Not very long ago, Oslo was an icy Shangri-la of Scandinavian self-discipline, governability, and respect for the law. But in recent years, there have been grim changes, including a rise in gay-bashings. The summer of 2006 saw an unprecedented wave of them. The culprits, very disproportionately, are young Muslim men.
Well I guess it was a good thing for Satender Singh that his attackers weren’t Muslims then. Except, he’s just as dead isn’t he? And that didn’t happen in Europe…it happened right here in America. Gay bashings, even killings, at the hands of young men who later claim a divine purpose to their bloodshed are hardly uncommon here. Meanwhile, in pulpits all across America, the religious right is hyping up the Homosexual Menace. We’re destroyers of marriage, and the family, and for good measure, civilization itself. And when the rhetoric from the pulpits is transmuted into blood, the religious right looses no time in declaring itself innocent, and in fact itself a victim of oppression by radical homosexuals.
No, assaults by Muslims always have to be construed as defensive – as expressions not of power but of weakness, not of aggression but of helplessness. To suggest that the culprits, far from being fragile, sensitive flowers who’ve been pushed over the line by something we did, are in fact bullies driven by an overweening sense of superiority and a deep-seated malice – both of which they’ve been carefully taught at home, at school, and, yes, in the mosque – is verboten.
Boy doesn’t that sound familiar. When was the last time you saw the American news media pointing a finger at the hate coming from the pulpits? Can’t remember? Neither can I. And I know I’d have heard about it because the religious right would have been screaming about the liberal news media and it’s anti-Christian pro-homosexual agenda so loud you could hear it on the moon.
By framing this as an exclusively Muslim problem, Bower plays right into the hands of those who raise the race card whenever Islamic extremism is called out for what it is. But worse then that, he’s wrong. Spectacularly wrong. Horribly wrong. Damnably wrong. Shara law, when and if it delivers Europe back into the dark ages, will be wearing a Jesus mask, not a Mohamed mask. In the Arab world it is the Mohammad mask. Maybe elsewhere it will look something like this…
A Jewish invocation will be used by ultra Orthodox rabbis in Jerusalem to curse the organizers of the Gay Pride March and the police who protect them, said a spokesman for the Edah Haredit Monday.
In a ceremony known as “Pulsa D’nura” (blows of fire), rabbis of the anti-Zionist Edah Haredit rabbinic court will convene sometime before the march, which is scheduled for Friday, to conduct the kabbalistic ceremony which is believed to unleash unearthly powers against specified sinners.
According to Shmuel Poppenheim, a spokesman for the Edah Haredit, Rabbi Moshe Sternbach, head of the Edah Haredit’s rabbinic court proposed conducting the ceremony during a meeting of rabbinic judges Monday morning.
“All the rabbis were together at the rabbinic court to proceed over a chalitza (part of a levirate ceremony),” said Poppenheim. “After the chalitza, Rabbi Sternbach recommended doing the Pulsa D’nura.”
Pulsa D’nura is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud (Baba Metzia 47a) and in the Zohar.
“If done by a competent, God-fearing rabbinic court like the Edah Haredit, the people who are cursed do not live out the year,” said a Jerusalem-based rabbi who preferred to remain anonymous.
In 2005 a young ultra orthodox Jew, Yishai Schlissel, stabbed three gay Israelis during a Pride march. During his interrogation he said,
“I came to murder on behalf of God. We can’t have such abomination in the country.”
What you need to understand is that this violent hatred of the secular world, and all the freedom it brings, and human potential it unleashes, is not a Muslim phenomena, nor is it particular or even necessary to any one religion or faith. And in a deeper sense, it’s not even about homosexuality. It’s about modernism. It’s about freedom, about the awesome human potential that modern democracy has unleashed. It’s fundamentally about the ones who can’t cope with it…the ones who are Left Behind.
In his time, Haffner saw it…
Money came into the country, the currency maintained its value, and business was good. The older generation began to retrieve its store of experience from the attic, burnish it bright, and show it off, as if it had never been invalidated. The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream. The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for saviors or revolutionaries. The pubic sector required only competent officials, and the private sector only hard working businessmen. There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food, and a little political boredom. Everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their own personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own tastes, and to find their own paths to happiness.
Now something strange happened – and with this I believe I am about to reveal one of the most fundamental political events of our rime, something that was not reported in any newspaper; by and large that invitation was declined. It was not what was wanted. A whole generation was, it seemed, at a loss as to how to cope with the offer of an unfettered private life.
There’s the root of it. The threat to democracy now, and eternally, is not Islam, but the Left Behind, and their sullen, resentful, hatred of everything a human being can be, of everything humanity can become, that they cannot. Or at any rate could, if only they weren’t so afraid of existence. This isn’t a Muslim thing. It’s a human thing. The Left Behind are everywhere, in every nation, of every race, in every culture. To embrace their cheapshit paranoias about Otherness, is to let them win the only battle that matters…the one for your soul. You embrace their fear and hatred of The Other, and the next thing you know you will be taking the ax to your precious democracy just as cheerfully as they are. Side by side you’ll both systematically destroy it. And then the next thing to get the ax, will be you. Because a race to the bottom is always won by the one that’s already there.
It is not radical Islam that threatens to destroy the West from within Bowers, it is the likes of you and your fellow fighting 101st Keyboarders over at Pajamas. ‘Multiculturalism’ is just one of this period’s trite little buzz-words that simply acknowledges the fact that in a free country your neighbor has the right to dress funny, and worship in a funny looking church if they want to. And maybe, just maybe, there might be something of value in their lives for the rest of us to take note of. Or not. But that’s how melting pots work after all you drooling moron. And as Jefferson said, it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Multiculturalism is no more about giving Muslim men the right to rape women any more then the American civil rights movement was about giving black men the right to rape women, although a lot of white conservatives back then seemed to think it was. Grow up. You’re fighting the wrong enemy, and in the process you are loosing the war.
The Muslim man who looks you in the face hails from a culture that gave humanity the modern decimal system, and which preserved much of what the ancients knew through the dark ages. You know…that period of time in Europe where the Christian church burned faggots and heretics at the stake. And if you think that’s all in your culture’s past, and that the primative, fanatical haters of his kind don’t also have their precise counterparts among yours too, or that yours are at least no great threat to your peace and freedom, you are sadly, horribly, fatally mistaken.
The enemy within, the one you need to fear the most, is the one that wears a face much like yours, and gives you a sincere smile and a hearty handshake, and whispers in your ear that this world would be So much nicer without all those horrible other people in it…
Kwame Kilpatrick was a guest on Real Time with Bill Mayer on Friday, Feb. 27 [2004]. On the show, which is broadcast live on the cable television network HBO, Kilpatrick adamantly opposed marriage for gays.
"I think that where this doesn’t belong is in a political discussion and I think that that’s where we’re starting off on the wrong foot," Kilpatrick said. "I personally do not support gay marriage. No, I don’t support gay marriage."
"Is that a political opinion?" Mayer asked.
"I think that marriage is between a woman and a man," answered Kilpatrick. "That is not a political opinion. If I was not in politics I’d say the same thing."
"Based on what?"
"Based on who I am, whose I am and where I come from," Kilpatrick continued.
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is hanging on for his political life after the revelation that, among 14,000 text messages between him and his chief of staff Christine Beatty, there was evidence of an extramarital affair between the pair — evidence that contradicts his sworn statements in a whistleblower case brought by former police officers that ended in $9 million in damages against the city.
City Councilman Kwame Kenyatta this afternoon began the process to initiate a full audit of the finances of the mayor’s office — including travel and legal charges — since Kwame Kilpatrick took office in 2002.
A full council vote is expected next week.
Kenyatta also wants the city’s Auditor General to investigate the law department and what type of legal representation it has provided Kilpatrick.
Last week it was confirmed that a secret deal was hatched to help settle an $8 million whistle-blower’s lawsuit filed by two ex-police officers. The deal prevented the disclosure of text messages embarrassing to the mayor. The messages confirmed an affair between Kilpatrick and his now-ex chief of staff Christine Beatty, contrary to their testimony during the whistle-blower’s trial.
No doubt the fact that Michigan allows same sex marriage is responsible for Mr. Kilpatrick’s cheating on his wife. Oh…wait…
MICHIGAN
Current law: DOMA written into state constitution and state law
Legislation: State constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage placed on the Nov. 2 [2004] ballot by citizen initiative groups and approved by 59 percent of voters.
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